Volume 44, Number 1
January/February 1993

Arabic place names - ranging from simply colorful to historically memorable - dot the landscape of present-day Spain. They tell us much about the ebb and flow of Arab conquest and settlement in al-Andalus.

This monarch wrote poetry "as beautiful as the bud when it opens to disclose the flower," said one chronicler. Al-Mu'tamid's life, with its dramatic twists, was a metaphor for the rise and fall of Islamic Spain.